Wednesday, October 30, 2013

These days it seems that new categories of celebrities are popping up all the
time. Celebrity doctors, celebrity chefs, celebrity real estate agents,
celebrity plumbers, you name it, fueled in good part by reality TV shows.

The reason I mention this is that I've been swept up, at least peripherally,
by the current cult of celebrity. In a way it's appropriate since I live
in a neighborhood populated by celebrities, with my next door neighbor being
the director of "Dancing With The Stars". When I yelled at a guy for blocking the street in front of my house his response was "Do you know who I am?" (No, I didn't.) Eva Mendes lives a few hundred yards down the hill as the crow flies, and from my bedroom I
can see Selma Blair's baby daddy's house.(His wi-fi connection sometimes shows up on my computer.) In our
same tract Brad Pitt has his Hollywood compound, Nicolas Cage had one of his pre-liquidation
homes, and Adam Levine just sold his property. And years ago Cary
Grant and Randolph Scott shared their bachelor estate not far away.

So where do I fit in with all this? Well unless you accidentally came through
the door or are one of my family or friends, the reason you are reading this
can be traced to food writer Clarissa Wei who wrote her LA Weekly food section
article on me as the crazy lawyer who had eaten at 6000 Chinese restaurants.
Fine, I could see how that would be mildly interesting to foodies.
Even when Huffington Post picked the story up that made some sense since
they have a dining section. What didn't make sense was when People.com
picked the story up on their homepage, having it as top item in their headline
section for 2 hours until it was bumped by a story about Britney Spears.
That in turn led to numerous celebrity gossip websites republishing the
People.com story.

So for 15 seconds I was a celebrity. But what kind of celebrity could
I be considered? Well when you think about it, I'm not a food critic as
I've only published one restaurant review in my life, and that was 35 years
ago.I'm not a Chinese food expert as I
often have no idea what's in the Chinese food I've eaten. I'm not even a
foodie because I don't photograph any of my meals. So what does that make
me? Apparently, America's first celebrity diner! Only in Hollywood
I guess.